I have a Attache portable USB 512m drive. For some reason my desk top (XP) is not reading it. As you can see in the picture something is there but no letter. MY laptop reads in fine. I have tried rebooting but still nothing.

XP has a glitch to it that if the next drive letter after your local drives (HD & CD drives) is a network drive it will not post the usb drive under "My Computer". If this is the case for you, remap the network drive to a different drive letter and reboot. Then try the USB drive again.

XP has a glitch to it that if the next drive letter after your local drives (HD & CD drives) is a network drive it will not post the usb drive under "My Computer". If this is the case for you, remap the network drive to a different drive letter and reboot. Then try the USB drive again.

"network drive"????? it doesn't sound like this is the case here but i could be wrong.

puter hater

my 2 xp desktop machines have cd's and cd burners and the usb stick shows as "e" drive also

What I was suggesting before still might work even if this is just a home PC. Try unplugging whatever device is using the drive letter following your local drives. For example, C: is your hard drive, and D: is your CD drive, unplug whatever device is using the drive letter E: and plug the portable drive again and see if it picks up that drive letter. I've seen this happen before on XP in a work networking environment, but it's at least worth giving it a shot in your case also.

First step, Start, Programs, Accessories, System Tools, System Restore. Create a restore point and name it something like "Before USB Fix". This is to bail you out if something goes wrong during the following process and makes things worse.

Create a file with NOTEPAD containing the following lines and save it as FIX.REG
-------------------------- Use text after this line --------------------------------
REGEDIT4

"DEVMGR_SHOW_NONPRESENT_DEVICES"="1"
-------------------------- Use text before this line --------------------------------

Double click on FIX.REG and say yes to the Merge Into Registry question.

Unplug ALL USB devices.
Open Device Manager.
View, Show Hidden Devices.
Uninstall all devices under USB Controllers.
Uninstall all devices under Disk Drives that you know are not present.
Uninstall all devices under Storage Volumes. Say no to any reboot prompts until you are finished. Also, if a Storage Volume doesn't uninstall, ignore it and move to the next one.
If you have a yellow ? with unknown devices, uninstall all of the entries there as well.

When this is done, reboot TWICE.

Reconnect the USB devices and see if they're recognized properly.

NOTE: If you have a USB keyboard and/or mouse, you'll have to modify the instructions and leave enough parts for those to function. I don't have one yet, so I haven't had time to modify the instructions.

__________________Remember: Data you don't have at least two copies of is data you don't care about.

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